Country I'm trying escape

My Trauma Is a Country I Escaped

The Borderlands

My trauma begins in the borderlands—

that thin, trembling place between what I knew

and what I was told to believe.

It was never a single moment.

It was a climate.

A weather system that settled over my life

long before I had the language to name it.

In that country, silence was currency.

Compliance was citizenship.

And I learned early that the safest way to survive

was to make myself small enough

to pass through the cracks in the walls.

I didn’t know then that the walls were not protection.

They were containment.

A fortress built from someone else’s fear

and maintained by my obedience.

The Architecture of Harm

Trauma is not an event.

It is architecture.

It is the way a house teaches you

which rooms are safe

and which ones are traps.

I lived in a structure where the air shifted

depending on someone else’s mood.

Where footsteps in the hallway

could mean nothing

or everything.

Where I learned to read the weather

in the angle of a jaw,

the pause before a sentence,

the way a door closed.

I became fluent in danger

long before I became fluent in myself.

And when I finally began to speak—

to name what had been done,

to claim the truth I had carried alone—

they called me cruel.

As if honesty were a blade

and silence were mercy.

The Ritual of Unfolding

There is a moment in every survivor’s life

when the folding stops.

When the body refuses to contort

into the shapes that once kept it safe.

My moment came quietly.

Not with a scream,

but with a breath I didn’t apologize for.

I unfolded.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

Like a creature remembering

it was never meant to live in a cage.

And the world around me—

the one that benefited from my shrinking—

shook.

They said I was changing.

They said I was cold.

They said I was unrecognizable.

But the truth is simpler:

I was finally recognizable to myself.

The Children I Carried Out

Trauma is not just what happened to me.

It is what I refused to pass on.

I carried my children out of that country

with my arms shaking

and my resolve unbroken.

I learned to build a new home

from scraps of courage,

from the quiet belief that safety

is not a luxury—

it is a birthright.

They will not inherit my silence.

They will not inherit my shrinking.

They will not inherit the architecture

that once held me captive.

I am the border they will never have to cross.

The Morning Verdicts

Each morning, I deliver a verdict to myself.

Not guilty.

Not broken.

Not dramatic.

Not cruel.

Just true.

Just surviving.

Just choosing myself again.

Trauma taught me to anticipate danger.

Healing taught me to anticipate myself.

And now, when I wake,

I do not brace for impact.

I brace for possibility.

The Country I Am Building

My trauma is no longer the country I live in.

It is the country I escaped.

A place I can map with precision

but no longer belong to.

I am building something new—

a landscape shaped by clarity,

by refusal,

by the quiet, steady truth

that I deserve to exist without fear.

This new country has no walls.

Only thresholds.

Only rooms with open windows.

Only spaces where my children can breathe

without listening for footsteps.

And at the center of it all—

a hearth I lit myself,

with hands that once trembled

and now do not.